Systems and methods herein generally relate to printing systems, and more particularly to systems that use one device to perform printing, and other devices to perform finishing operations (and that use banner sheets to track print jobs as they move between processing stations so as to promote the workflow between such devices).
Print shops have several production process steps that are applied to print jobs. These include printing, finishing, kitting, shipping, etc. These processes may be separated in location and/or time, and the intermediate job output should be accurately tracked as it moves between processing stations. In addition, job-specific handling and processing instructions may be specified for each job and should be accurately associated with the associated job output. If job output is misidentified between processing steps or job-specific instructions are misapplied, the result may be incorrect product output or an incorrect shipping destination. Highly effective systems accurately identify the job output between the different processing steps and ensure that correct instructions are associated with each job.
Further, current systems allow print shops to use document creation or workflow applications to create their own customized auxiliary production sheets to be printed with each print job. These sheets contain shop-specific job identification information as text, bar codes, or other graphical objects. The job identification information can be read by humans or optical devices, such as bar code scanners, to allow for reliable identification of the job. Job attributes submitted with the job instruct the digital printing press to automatically process a specified number of leading pages of the document as production job sheets (exception pages or sheets) instead of as part of the finished product. Page exception programming can be manually or automatically applied to easily distinguish banner pages based on job characteristics such as post-print processing steps, scheduling, and destination.